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Apples
Monday, the girls and I went to the pastor’s home to pick apples.
He has about 10 trees (I think) and they all look like this one. We picked three 100 lb. feed sacks full. I am estimating each sack holds 1 and 1/2 bushel of apples. So that means we got close to 5 bushels of apples. At our local store, apples are selling for $20.00 a bushel. That means I have about $100.00 of apples sitting in my kitchen that were just gave to me. God is good!! They also gave us the last of their grapes-about 1 bushel. Yesterday, the girls and I juiced the grapes they gave us and did one batch of juice from our grapes. We also did a batch of apples in the juicer and tried a new recipe crockpot maple apple jam. It is very good. It reminds me of apple butter but has a distinctive maple taste.
We picked the last of our grapes today-about 1/2 bushel. We put them in the fridge for today. Maybe we will just eat on them for a while instead of juicing them. I hope to do more apples this evening but I’m not sure. We might have to wait until tomorrow to start on them. I am wanting to try a new recipe I saw for apple pie using honey instead of sugar. It looked really good.
Well, I guess that’s all that has been going on around here-just grapes and apples. I hope you all have a great day and God bless.
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Raines Elementary
Hello everyone! I thought I would share this picture with you all. I found this on facebook the other day. This is where I went to school from 1st to 6th grade. In my 7th grade, they decided to tear down the school and build a new one. They then moved all us students to another building. I have many fond memories (and some not so fond) of this place. You see, I went to school during the time when teachers could still paddle. Not only that, but if I got in trouble at school, I knew I was in trouble at home. How did we ever get to where we are now. If a kid gets in trouble at school now, it is always the teachers fault never the kids. Oh well, sorry, I think I got on a rabbit trail there. Any way back to the picture. The small building you see in the right hand corner is the girls toilet. That’s right, toilet-not bathroom. You can not see it but there is one just like it on the left for the boys. No swings or any type of play equipment. Sometimes, someone would bring a board bat and a ball and we would play ball. Most times, we just played tag and hide and go seek, jump rope, hop scotch, things like that. In the upper left is the coal house and the pump house. Starting at the right of the building, the first room was the 3rd and 4th grade, next was 1st and 2nd, then 5th and 6th and the last room was for the 7th grade. I guess they thought if you made it to 7th grade, you deserved a room all to yourselves. As you probably guessed, we were a small school and everyone knew everyone, no matter what grade you were in. The older grades watched out for the younger grades. Everyone’s parents knew everyone’s parents. Of course, this meant you couldn’t get into too much meanness because someone was bound to tell on you. But I liked that, we knew where our boundaries were.
Well, that’s my walk down memory lane. I hope I didn’t bore you all too much. We are working with grapes today. So I better get off here and get started. Enjoy your day and God bless.
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Wednesday
Hi everyone! Just a short post on how our day is (hopefully) going to progress. We are first working on tomatoes. We picked about 3/4 of a bushel yesterday evening. After the tomatoes are done, we plan on working with grapes. I have a plan of working up about 1/2 bushel everyday. We made 14 pts of grape jelly yesterday so today all the grapes will go to making juice. We had some fresh grape juice this morning with breakfast. Also some of the grape jelly. Both were delicious. They taste like eating fresh grapes. I used the Pamona Pectin to make the jelly. I really like it. With SureJell, to make a batch of jelly you need 5 cups of juice and 7 cups of sugar. With the Pamona, 4 cups of juice and only 2 cups of sugar. That is a really big difference.
I hope you all have a great day and God bless.
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Grapes
The girls and I are starting on our grapes today. We picked 1/2 bushel this morning. We plan on making mostly jelly from these. Tomorrow we will start making juice. Yesterday I went to our friend Mrs. Faye. I helped her with her grapes. She wanted to make jelly and juice. Last year, they purchased a steam canner and a steam juicer like ours but they were not too confident with using them. So I went over to help them a little. It was a fun day. We had green beans, corn, cucumbers, cole slaw and cornbread for lunch. YUM!
Not much else going on here. Just mostly canning. We plan on picking more tomatoes this evening. We have been blessed with lots of beautiful tomatoes. Our temperatures have been cooler at night here. You can feel fall in the air. The dogwood trees are starting to turn colors. Apples will soon be ready. I love fall. As I am sitting here typing this post, the sweet smell of grapes fills my home. God is so good to us.
I hope you all have a wonderful day and God bless.
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Homemade Deodorant
Vicki and I made this homemade deodorant. I LOVE it. I’m not sure where the recipe came from though.
Powder deodorant: 1/2 cup baking soda, 1/2 cup cornstarch, about 10-15 drops essential oil (we used lavender)
Add 1/2 cup softened coconut oil to make solid deodorant. I prefer the powdered one.
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New Canner and Homemade Deodorant
This is my new canner. I stopped at a yard sale a few weeks ago and the lady had this canner for sale. One of the handles was missing so she sold it to me for $5.00. Yesterday, I stopped at Farmers Supply here in Floyd to see if they could order new handles. I had no idea if they could or not as the canner appears to be old. Well, they could and they only cost me $8.00. I then went to the extension office and had them calibrate the guage. It was off 1 and 1/2 pounds so I thought I probably should get a new guage too. This cost $l8.00. Amazing. These parts will be in by Friday. So for roughly $30.00 I got a new canner. This one is much taller than my other ones. It will hold 1/2 gallon jars which I plan to use for our juice that we can.
Then we went on over to Vicki’s and had a great visit. We ate lunch together and then Vicki and I made homemade deodorant.
We used tea tree oil in the solid deodorant and lavender in the powder. I really like it. It smells so fresh and clean. I am impressed. I definitely will be making it again.
Today the girls and I are making spaghetti sauce. This will be our last batch of spaghetti sauce. I think the rest of the tomatoes will just be used to make tomato juice. Our tomatoes are doing very well this year. I think this isthe best ours have done in a long time.
I better go stir the spaghetti sauce as I do not have Mrs. Sally’s good kettle any longer. I took it back to her Sunday. Enjoy your day and God bless.
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Piebald Deer
We saw one of these last night on our way home from church. It was very exciting. I have never seen one before. The one we saw had a little more brown on it in the front and it was a buck. It was down close to the road so we got a really good look at it. Amazing! I am not sure what the girls and I will be working on today. I want to check the tomatoes and see if any more are ready and see how close the grapes are to being ready. If no garden harvest is ready, I guess we’ll just do normal housework. I hope you all have a great day. God bless.
I got the picture at http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/nov/27/piebald-deer-a-rare-find-in-area-woods/
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Divide and Conquer
Yesterday we divided up to get more done. This is not something we usually do. We normally all work together on projects, However, Hubby wanted to start boxing in the remainder of the back porch and we had lots of tomatoes to work up. So Julie helped me with the tomatoes and Grace helped Hubby with the porch.
The girls worked with me today on more tomatoes and Hubby worked alone. We had to run into little town first to get a few supplies that he needed .The walls are now up and there is a window where they are standing at. He still has to put a door on and the siding but it is almost finished. T.
I better get busy working on my Sunday School lesson. I hope you all have a great evening and God bless.
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Thursday
I thought I would share with you all this picture of a beautiful hawk we saw the other day on one of our rides in the bumpy truck. I know the picture is a little blurred but you can still see how pretty he is.
Yesterday, the girls and I made 13 pts of pizza sauce. The Horn’s came over for a visit. We had 15 bean soup, sourdough biscuits and molasses cookies for dessert. It was a fun visit. We had planned on picking apples but when we got up to the tree, we discovered a huge hornets nest on one of the limbs. We decided to wait to pick apples.
Today we are making salsa. I hope to make either ketchup or spaghetti sauce tomorrow. We will pick tomatoes this evening and see how many we get. I mentioned we had sourdough biscuits with our soup yesterday evening. Well, I think I have finally found a biscuit recipe that we like. I am not very good at making biscuits but these turned out really well. I made them again this morning and they were really good with sausage gravy. (But then almost everything is good with sausage gravy).
I hope you all have a great evening and God bless.
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